PASSING stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me,as of a dream,)I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,All is recall’d as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate,chaste, matured,You grew up with me, were a boy with me, or a girl with me,I ate with you, and slept with you–your body has become not yoursonly, nor left my body mine only,You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass–youtake of my beard, breast, hands, in return,I am not to speak to you–I am to think of you when I sit alone, orwake at night alone,I am to wait–I do not doubt I am to meet you again,I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

Let us, though late, at last, my Silvia, wed;And loving lie in one devoted bed.Thy watch may stand, my minutes fly post haste;No sound calls back the year that once is past.Then, sweetest Silvia, let's no longer stay;True love, we know, precipitates delay.Away with doubts, all scruples hence remove!No man, at one time, can be wise, and love.

The sorrow of true love is a great sorrowAnd true love parting blackens a bright morrow:Yet almost they equal joys, since their despairIs but hope blinded by its tears, and clearAbove the storm the heavens wait to be seen.But greater sorrow from less love has beenThat can mistake lack of despair for hopeAnd knows not tempest and the perfect scopeOf summer, but a frozen drizzle perpetualOf drops that from remorse and pity fallAnd cannot ever shine in the sun or thaw,Removed eternally from the sun’s law.

When I was one-and-twentyI heard a wise man say,“Give crowns and pounds and guineasBut not your heart away;Give pearls away and rubiesBut keep your fancy free.”But I was one-and-twenty,No use to talk to me.

When I was one-and-twentyI heard him say again,“The heart out of the bosomWas never given in vain;’Tis paid with sighs a plentyAnd sold for endless rue.”And I am two-and-twenty,And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.

​You are like me, you will die too, but not today:you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine:if I say to you “To you I say,” you have not beenset to music, or broadcast live on the ghostradio, may never be an oil paintingor Old Master’s charcoal sketch:you are a concordance of person, number, voice, and place, strawberries spread through your nameas if it were budding shrubs, how you remind meof some spring, the waters as cool and clear(late rain clings to your leaves, shaken by light wind),which is where you occur in grassy moonlight:and you are a lily, an aster, white trillium or viburnum,by all rights mine, white starin the meadow sky, the snow still arrivingfrom its earthwards journeys, here where there is no snow (I dreamed the snow was you, when there was snow),you are my right, have come to be my night (your body takes onthe dimensions of sleep, the shape of sleepbecomes you): and you fall from the sky with several flowers,words spill from your mouth in waves, your lips taste like the sea,salt-sweet (trees and seas have flown away, I call it loving you):home is nowhere, therefore you,a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all, and free of any eden we can name.